Filosofia

The category of “origin” plays a key role in Benjamin’s conception of the representation of the past, to the extent that some of his most important works are explicitly presented as historical researches on the origin. The goal of this paper is to show the figurative approach to the past that Benjamin developed through this category. To grasp the core of this figurative method we will use two different entry pathways. First, we must trace the category of origin back to the context of Goethean morphology, whose main categories (“polarity”, “extreme” or “Urphänomen”) can be found in Benjamin’s methodological writings. Second, in order to fully appreciate the way Benjamin uses the morphological method to represent the past, we will show its affinities with Wittgenstein’s philosophical method, whose investigations on language are also in debt with Goethean morphology (as reflected in categories such as “perspicuous representation”, “family resemblance” or “vision of aspects”). The Goethean filiation of both methods will allow us to profile a possible aesthetic approach to philosophical research, aimed at the same time at grasping the generality of phenomena and at saving their individual uniqueness.

This paper explores the methodological affinity between the work of Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Benjamin’s attempt to develop a new method of historical representation focus on the category of “origin”, which underlies his most remarkable historical researches. Parallel to Benjamin, also Wittgenstein paid special attention to the problem of a philosophical presentation of phenomena, specially in his linguistic researches, through categories such as the “perspicuous representation” or the “aspect seeing”. The common filiation of both authors reflection on Goethes’s morphology will allow us to profile a possible aesthetic approach of philosophical research, aimed at the same time at grasping the generality of phenomena and at saving their individual uniqueness.

El presente trabajo trata de analizar el estado actual de crisis como una crisis de nuestra experiencia del tiempo histórico. Tras décadas de debate acerca del fin de la historia, hoy día asistimos a una reactivación de la historia, si bien la apertura a la contingencia histórica parece adoptar un carácter decididamente catastrófico. A la rebaja de expectativas en cuanto a la transformación del orden social que implicaba la tesis del fin de la historia viene a sumarse ahora una nueva rebaja, liquidando la posibilidad misma de un cambio histórico en sentido radical.

The following paper focuses on the theory of imitation developed by Walter Benjamin in the famous work of art essay. The essay is approached as a new sample of the “research on the origin” already used in his previous works, which will allow us to highlight the key role assigned to “mimesis” as the “origin” which discloses the unitary law of the whole age. The essay, therefore, overcomes the limited
scope of aesthetics in which traditionally has been framed and aims to a wider reflection on the inner contradictions of modernity, regarding which mimesis indicates both the problem and a possible way out.